


Weakness

by Clarebear



Category: The Walking Dead (TV), The Walking Dead - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Porn With Plot
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-01-04
Updated: 2015-02-03
Packaged: 2018-03-05 07:00:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 12,572
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3110426
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Clarebear/pseuds/Clarebear
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Daryl is injured. Beth is persistent.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Imagined as a PWP oneshot but evolved into something more. Takes place during the prison season and diverges from there.

Herschel had passed on his pig-headed stubbornness to his girls, Daryl knew this. He had tracked walkers enough times with Maggie to know that when the woman set her sights on something, it was only a matter a time of until she got it.

It had been stupid for him to imagine Beth might be any different.

It started late one night after he’d gotten stuck out after dark on a hunt. When he made it back after midnight he went to find Rick and found Beth instead, sleeping in the cell where they’d built the makeshift crib for Judith.

She woke up right away. “Daryl,” she said, sitting up.

“Where’s Rick?” He kept his voice low, trying not to wake the baby. He had one hand braced against the edge of the open cell door, the other gripping his side.

“They’re out looking for you.” She slipped out of bed, pulling the blanket with her. “We were so worried when you didn’t come back. What happened?”

“When’d they leave? Which way’d he go?” 

Beth adjusted the blanket around her shoulders. “He said if you got back to tell you to wait here.”

“Which way did they go, Beth?”

For someone with such a soft face, she could set her chin hard. She shifted her weight, the concrete cold beneath her bare feet. “He said you should wait here,” she said again, more firmly this time. 

Daryl had no patience for this. He grabbed her by the wrist, dragging her out of the cell to somewhere where he wouldn’t wake Judith.

“Which. Way. Did they. Go?” he hissed, cornering her between his body and a wall. “I ain't fucking around.”

Beth looked at him. He had expected her to look frightened, or even angry. But her expression was even. “It won’t work to bully me,” she told him. “You don’t scare me like you do the others.” 

Daryl let his fist slam against the cinderblocks of the wall, looking over his shoulder to curse. “Goddamn it!” He grabbed his side again, annoyed at himself for wincing.

Beth looked down. “You’re hurt,” she said. She reached for him.

“Get off me!” He swiped her hand away. Glaring, he said, “Idiot kid. This could be a walker bite. Want us both to be gnawing on everyone's legs in the morning?”

“Is it? Were you bit?”

Daryl wiped his free hand across his mouth. He shook his head. He looked over his shoulder into the cellblock, seeing if he woke anyone. “Damned boar," he said. "Tracked that bastard for six hours. Charged me outta the underbrush.”

Beth reached for him again. He let her this time, grudgingly moving his hand so she could peel his blood-stained shirt up to see the wound.

As she inspected the cut, he peered out the bar-latticed window behind her, searching for movement in the yard. “I need to go after them. They shouldn’t out there this late.”

“You just were. Besides, you wouldn’t be able to find them in the dark, even if you weren’t injured. This needs to be cleaned, Daryl.”

Daryl pulled his shirt back down, brushing her hand away. “It’s fine,” he said. “I’ll deal with it in the morning.”

“It’ll get infected. You need stitches, too, at least a couple. We should—”

“I said its fine!”

Beth stood up straight, crossing her arms in front of her. The motion made the blanket slip off one of her shoulders. 

It was reflexive, how Daryl’s gaze was drawn to her bare skin. Moonlight gave her paleness a bluish glow in the dark.

A second passed, maybe less, before Beth shrugged the blanket back over her tank top, but it was long enough. He knew she’d felt his eyes on her. 

Daryl looked away, scrubbing at the hair on the back of his neck. He cursed himself out in his head. He was too cooped up in this place. Starting to prey on underage girls like some redneck pedophile. Herschel’s kid, no less. The man was barely cold in his grave.

“Look,” he started, not sure yet whether he would try apologize or pretend it didn’t happen, but stopped when he saw the way Beth was watching him. Her expression was odd. Curious, somehow, as if she were seeing him in a way she hadn’t before. Whatever way she was looking at him, it was no longer like he was one of her dad’s friends. 

Daryl wasn’t good at reading these situations, but he knew enough to realize he was in trouble. He took a step backwards, shaking his head.

“Nuh-uh,” he said, “No fucking way, kid.”

Beth drew the blanket more tightly around her, the same curiosity in her eyes as she watched him walk away. 

 

 

\-----

 

Rick and the rest of the search party made it back an hour before dawn. Rick looked half-dead with exhaustion, but gave Daryl a one-armed hug and told him he was glad he was safe. Michonne took one look at him and said, “Kitchen. Now.” 

Daryl grimaced as she poured alcohol over his wound, staring up at the kitchen ceiling. They were using the stainless steel table as a sickbed of sorts.

“You should have cleaned this right away. What were you thinking?”

“Christ, woman,” he hissed, jerking away as she none-too-gently dabbed the cut with a cloth.

“Don’t move.”

"I could ask you the same thing,” Daryl gritted out. He was sweating like a whore in church. “You and Rick, what the hell were you thinking, both of you going out there together. If neither of you made it back, rest of these halfwits woulda been dead in days.”

“Funny. We said similar things about losing you. Suppose you could call it a compliment.”

“Give me that before you start with the needle and shit,” Daryl said, reaching for the liquor. Vodka was hardly his drink of choice, but he finished what was left in the bottle.

“Stupidity is what I call it,” he said, savoring the familiar after-burn of the booze. “And Rick being a dad and all? Don’t do that shit again. Not on my account.”

“Not your decision, is it.”

Daryl stopped trying to make his point, in part because arguing with Michonne was like playing chicken with a brick wall, and in part because she’d started in on the stitches. It took all his concentration not to grind his teeth to the gums. 

 

 

\-----

 

Carl had always been a good kid, but Daryl was never so fond of him as that afternoon when he showed up bearing gifts. 

“They were my mom’s,” he said. “I’ve been carrying them around for a while. I figure you could use them, what with being injured and all.”

What they were were 15 mg tablets of oxycodone in a plastic Ziploc. Carl tossed them onto Daryl’s blanket. Michonne had ordered Daryl to strict bed rest for the next few days, and threatened to have him locked in his cell if he didn’t obey.

“I thought we were out of this shit after we finished off Merle’s stash,” Daryl said. He picked up the bag to examine the contents in the dim light of the prison cell. The baggy was so crumpled from being jammed into pockets that it looked more opaque than clear, but the pills, from what Daryl could tell, looked whole.

Carl gave a one-shouldered shrug. “Maybe she had her own stash, I don’t know. I found them after she died. Didn’t want to tell my dad. He don’t like talking about her much, you know.”

“Yeah,” Daryl said. “I know.”

Carl didn’t say anything for a bit, just kept looking at him. Daryl wondered what he was waiting for. Finally, the kid said, “Is it serious? Your stomach?”

“What?” Daryl said. “Christ, no. What’s wrong with you people? Michonne treating me like I’m a half hair away from dying, and now you? I should be out tracking that goddamn pig right now, not listening to you fuckers whine about some scratch.”

“If you get a fever, you could die. We don’t got anymore antibiotics.”

“Yeah, well,” Daryl exhaled. “If I fuck a two-penny whore I could get a blowjob and the clap, but that aint likely to happen right now either.”

Carl didn’t seem convinced. “It really scared people,” he said. “When we thought you were gone. It scared my dad.”

Swearing beneath his breath, Daryl moved to prop himself up further in his bunk. He refused to let himself grimace. For everything he was telling Carl, it didn’t feel too good using his stomach muscles.

“Look, kid,” he said. “Only way I’m dying is if I shoot myself in the head right now to get away from all these stupid-ass questions. I’m gonna be fine.”

 

 

\-----

 

Before the outbreak, Daryl had been careful about prescription pills. About drugs in general. Maybe he’d seen enough of his dad and Merle to know that Dixon men tended to get too attached to the feeling of not feeling.

Lying on his back in his cell, he understood why. He stared up at the metal of the bunk above him, mentally tracing the nothingness in his fingertips, his limbs, his middle. Not numb, just weightless. For the first time in forever, free from pain.

It would have been effortless for him to drift out of consciousness, but he was doing his best not to sleep. He wanted to hold onto this sensation for as long as he could.

It surprised him, then, when he turned his head to the side to find Beth. She was sitting in a chair next to his bed, one she must have dragged in from the guard room. She had one knee up and was using it as a makeshift desk as she scratched away in her journal.

Daryl blinked. If he was making her up, he had to criticize his creativity. He would have preferred his hallucinations dressed in something other than a ratty sweater and jeans.

He blinked again. Beth was leaning forward now, her journal tucked into her lap. She moved a piece of hair behind her ear.

“How are you feeling?” she asked.

She had always had that voice, like some princess out of an animated film that should be singing with birds and sweeping walkways and shit. Not running from the undead.

Melodic and soft and pure.

“Christ,” Daryl managed, half coughing, annoyed by the mushiness of his own mind. He looked back at the bunk above him.

“Are you hurting? Carl said he gave you some pain pills… are they helping at all?”

If by helping, she meant turning him into a goddamn pansy, then yes. They were helping perfectly.

He swallowed, trying to force himself to pull it together. “What time is it?”

“Late afternoon, maybe two hours before sunset? Rick and everyone are out in the yard. I can run and get them if you need something.”

Daryl shook his head.

He watched more than felt Beth place her palm on top of his bandages. Michonne had wrapped him up in an old t-shirt that they’d disinfected as best they could. She’d done a good job of it; blood had yet to soak through.

“What are you doing?” he heard himself ask.

“Seeing if it’s warm,” Beth said. If heat were coming off of it, it would mean it was infected.

Daryl wanted to swat her hand away, irritated that she and everyone else were making him play the invalid, but the world was moving in slow motion. He followed her hand as it left the makeshift bandage to trail over the bare skin of his stomach.

He hadn’t thought about the fact that he was shirtless until now. It was strange, almost dreamlike, watching her trace her fingertips across the ridges of his abdomen, over old scars and new bruises. He wasn’t sure if he couldn’t feel it because of the drugs, or because her touch was so feather light.

She held the same curiosity in her expression as she had the night before. Inquisitive, as if she were exploring something captivating and unknown.

Daryl felt like he was underwater, his muscles were so slow to respond. He saw himself catch her wrist.

Gruffly, he said, “You need to get yourself a boyfriend, kid. Someone your own age.”

Beth’s eyes found his. “I’m not interested in boys."

“There’s plenty a girls around, too. Sasha looks like she knows her way around pussy.”

“You know what I meant.”

Daryl did. She was tired of watching boys her age die, so had decided to pine after one of the few men with a chance of surviving this mess.

He let go of her arm. Beth used her hand to tuck her hair behind her ear again.

“I’ve seen the way you look at me,” she said.

It was a statement, not an accusation. As if she had said the weather was nice or mentioned that dinner was ready in the kitchen.

Beneath the sluggishness of his thoughts, Daryl knew she was right. Last night was hardly the first time his eyes had lingered. Just the first time he’d figured she’d noticed.

There had been times before. The girl was barely out of a training bra, but there she would be, walking around the yard in cut-off shorts and a halter top, legs longer than sin. Or laying on her stomach in the grass, ankles crossed as she wrote in that damned diary. Or once, when she was babysitting Judith, pacing lazily back and forth to put the baby to sleep while she hummed one of them annoying lullabies.

“Yeah, well…” Daryl drew his palm down over his chin scruff. His mind was too foggy to deal with this. ‘I’m a man,’ sounded too stupid and caveman-ish for an excuse, even to him. But Christ. The girl looked like a cross between a cheerleader and a kid they'd cast as Mary in a Nativity play. Men like him, they couldn’t see something that innocent without imagining it beneath them.

Beth’s palm was back over the bandage on his stomach. “I don’t think it feels warm,” she said, as if the last couple minutes hadn’t happened. “It’s hard to tell, though, through the dressing. You should check when you have it changed.”

Daryl understood when Carl appeared outside the cell; Beth had heard his footsteps coming and switched the subject back to safer territory.

“Beth,” Carl said. “My dad wants you to come take Judith. She’s fussy and won’t stop crying.”

Beth nodded, and Daryl sent silent praise to Carl for his timing. For the second time in one day, the boy had reaffirmed his position as Daryl’s favorite person in this rat hole of a place.

 

 

\-----

 

The pills wore off around the time the others went to bed. A trip to the bathroom had Daryl’s wound bleeding through its bandages. He did his best to change the dressing himself, switching out the t-shirt for a piece of torn bedsheet. He doused the wound with another half-pint of vodka, ignoring the way the broken flesh looked red and swollen. Catching his reflection in the cracked bathroom mirror, he saw his forehead was shiny with sweat.

“Bastard,” he breathed out, talking to the boar. He’d be damned if he made it this far into the apocalypse to die from fever brought on by a pig.

He was glad Michonne had given up on playing his bed nurse. He had expected her to come replace the bandages herself, but if she saw him like this, Daryl knew he wouldn’t hear the end of it. The woman would probably rally a brigade to go off in search of penicillin and get the lot of them killed.

Daryl washed down another couple oxycodone with a cup of tepid water back in his cell. He supposed he shouldn’t complain. It was a luxury for them to have running water, no matter how much it tasted like metal and pipe mold.

He was thinking of water—pure, crystal-clear water, floating in it, perfectly suspended, as the meds wandered their way through his system—when Beth showed up in his cell.

She held her pillow in front of her, her arms hugged around it. She may as well have been clutching a teddy bear.

“No,” Daryl said. He struggled to sit up, but his limbs refused to respond. He gave up. “No way in hell. Get out.”

“Please?” she said. Without waiting for a response, she was crawling in beside him. So light that the mattress barely shifted.

“I’m a quiet sleeper,” she said, settling in.

“It aint sleeping I’m worried about and you know it.”

“Just for tonight. Please.”

“Beth—”

“ _Please_.”

The nothingness floated through Daryl’s veins, and he couldn’t come up with a way to make her leave. Beth interpreted his lack of resistance as permission to stay.

“I’m older than you think,” she said into the dark.

“Which still makes you multiple decades too young for me.”

“I don’t care.”

“Yeah, well…” Daryl wondered how he ended up in this situation. “Rick sure as hell will, not to mention what your father would have said.”

Beth was silent for a while. “No one has to know,” she finally said.

In a moment of weakness, Daryl let himself think about it, just for a second. Rolling on top of her, the feel of her skin beneath his hands, those legs around his waist as he—

“No,” he said. He closed his eyes, shook his head. “Girls your age—you all go through this. Teenage crushes, it’s all hormones and shit. Hell, you used to hear about girls chasing down the buses of their favorite boy bands… That’s what this is. You’ll grow out of it.”

He felt Beth shift next to him. She was on her side, gazing at him, her elbow tucked beneath her head.

“When you were my age,” she said, “what were you doing? Skipping school, shooting BB guns, drinking underage…. I’m doing laundry. I’m cleaning, cooking food, caring for Judith… I watch you and the others leave and spend my days wondering if you’re ever going to come back.

“I’m not a child, Daryl. I haven’t been a child since any of this happened. I know what it is that I want, and I know what it is that I’m asking you for. I’m not going to change my mind, I’m just going to wait for you to change yours.”


	2. Chapter 2

In the beginning, there had been women Daryl paid for. Girls that traded their bodies for food or the promise of protection. A couple of them he had tried traveling with, but there was too much commitment and Daryl grew tired of watching them die.

No matter how little he’d slept at night—how careful he was to keep them breathing—they would always end up snarling and then silent, Daryl yanking a bolt out of their brain.

It was seeing them fall, one after one, that made him accept that only a small number of people were meant to make it through this. No matter what he did, almost everyone he met would die.

After he stopped trying, he missed the sex, of course. But once that need faded, he began missing the other parts more. The feeling of being touched by another human being. Of knowing that someone gave a shit if he lived or died, if only because he was providing her meals and shelter and security.

Apocalypse or not, he was still that grubby little boy who wanted to be wanted.

Finding Rick and his group, it was like coming out of the cold and into a furnace. Their warmth was indiscriminate, their need of him suffocating. They wanted his opinion. They wanted his leadership. Rick listened to what he said, and Carol cared whether he slept well at night or ate enough at dinner. Sometimes, their compassion choked him.

Daryl tossed under twisted blankets, not getting enough air. He was burning and so dry, his throat too cracked to swallow. His hair was plastered to his skin with sweat.

Occasionally, he felt hands on him. Human or walker, he wasn’t sure. He fought them away, fading into blackness only to awake and struggle against them again.

A voice, clear and soft, a cool weight against his forehead. “Please.” She was upset. “You have to drink this.”

Daryl let up, only for moment. The hands overpowered him and he was coughing, spluttering. Water laced with something bitter, and the darkness overtook him again.

 

\------

 

Michonne’s was the first face Daryl saw when he came out of his fever. She sat by his bunk, elbows on her knees, head bent over a book.

Daryl tried moving. Both his wrists were handcuffed to the bedframe.

He coughed, shoving his head back into the mattress as he tried shifting to a less excruciating position. His throat was made of sandpaper. “What the hell?”

Michonne leaned forward. Her hand had gone to her katana as soon as he’d moved, but she relaxed her grip on the hilt. Daryl figured that she had been assigned to off him if he woke up a walker.

She let out her breath.

“Never thought I’d be so happy to see an illiterate redneck alive.”

 

\------

 

It was a full week before Daryl felt even half himself again. According to Carl, his fever had lasted fifty-some hours, most of which consisted of him groaning and drenching the bed sheets in sweat.

“It’s the closest I’ve seen Beth to crying a while,” Carl remarked, poking at a dirt patch in the grass with a stick. He had taken to trailing after Daryl during his recovery, asking dumb questions and pointing out observations that Daryl had exactly zero interest in hearing.

Daryl grunted. It was his first trip out to the yard since his fever broke. He had been hen-pecked out of the cellblock that morning. Carol’s offhand comments about how sunshine did a body well had progressed to her forcibly dragging him out of his bunk.

“These sheets need to be washed, Daryl. And you need to get yourself out of whatever mood you’re in. You’re not going to feel better until you start trying.”

Daryl didn’t want to be around people. He’d made the mistake of seeking solitude in the guardroom, slumping down in the desk chair that still had one remaining armrest. He’d closed his eyes, lazily swiveling himself slightly back and forth with his foot.

When a soft noise at the door had him jolting, reaching for his crossbow that wasn’t there, he swore.

“Christ,” he let out, sinking back into the chair. He turned, partly to avoid looking at Beth where she stood against the doorframe, partly because the sudden motion had ripped at the stitches in his stomach. His hand automatically went to his bandages, checking for blood.

“What, you spying on me now?” he accused. “How long you been there?”

“I came to see how you’re feeling,” Beth said. “I saw Carol. She said you were out of bed.”

Daryl closed his eyes again, not answering. He tipped his head back against the backrest and waited for her to leave.

When she didn’t, he eventually rotated to look at her. The way the sun shined in through the windows made the frizz around her face glow gold.

“Don’t you have shit to be doing?” he asked. “Changing diapers, singing kumbaya… whatever the hell else you try do to be useful?”

The satisfaction of being cruel was blunted by Beth not giving him a reaction. She kept looking at him in that way she did. As if she were trying to absorb everything there was about him with her eyes.

Daryl cleared his throat. He adjusted himself obviously in his jeans, knowing the crassness would make her uncomfortable.

It did. She finally looked away.

She shifted, bringing her hand up to her arm to adjust the too-big sleeve of her sweater. The girl needed some clothes that fit her. She needed a lot of things.

When she managed to meet Daryl’s gaze again, she tucked a flyaway piece of hair behind her ear. “You should be eating more,” she said. “I know you’re giving the meals you’re brought to Lizzie and Mika. You’re never going to feel better if you don’t—”

“Fucking hell,” Daryl let out, standing up. “Christ! What, you people got a tracker on me? What do I have to do to get you to leave me the fuck alone.”

The chair he’d sent rolling banged into a metal filing cabinet as he shoved his way past Beth. He had strode down into the yard, barely making it a few feet onto the grass before Carl intercepted him.

“You’re bleeding again,” the boy had commented, running a bit to keep pace. “Did you tear your stitches? What happened?”

Daryl tightened his teeth. He’d let Carl ramble on about this or that, searching out a spot against the fence he could use as a backrest to sit down. One nearby. As Beth had so helpfully pointed out, he wasn’t eating much, and he’d lost a fair bit of weight from the fever.

He let his head drop back against the fence, ignoring the dots swimming in front of his vision. A five-minute walk and he was a hair’s breadth away from fainting. He wondered when he had become such a goddamn pussy.

When Beth came into the yard a half hour later, helping Carol hang laundry on a clothesline they’d fashioned from a downed power line, Daryl refused to look in her direction.

He didn’t need to see her Bambi eyes gazing at him from across the grass. He sure as hell didn’t need to see her up on her tiptoes, short shorts becoming shorter as she stretched to hang clothes over the line.

Those goddamned legs.

It was after Carl tipped his hat at them that he'd made the comment about how close Beth had come to crying while Daryl was sick.

“She kept saying she knew you weren’t going to die,” he went on. “But she wouldn’t leave your cell, not even when Dad told her to. Maggie and Glenn had to make her.”

Daryl didn’t say anything. Carl began dragging his stick along the fence, the clang of wood scraping over chain link. The noise drew the attention of a walker lolling near the trees. The woman turned, starting her slow stagger toward their spot on the fence.

“She’s the one that got you to drink the antibiotics that Michonne brought back, you know,” Carl said. “You wouldn’t listen to no one else, and they were too worried about spilling to force you. Dad’d nearly given up when Beth convinced them to let her try, and then you stopped fighting enough to drink.” He shrugged. “Funny, huh?”

Daryl squinted, watching the kid move along the fence to stab his stick through the eye of the approaching walker. He and Carl had very different ideas about what was funny.

 

\-----

 

“That’s for disinfecting wounds,” Michonne told him several hours later, standing over where Daryl sat on the gritty tiled floor. “You know, like the one that nearly killed you.”

Daryl took another swig of gin. He lifted it up against the flickering lights of the laundry room to see through the green glass. It was nearly empty.

“Well, shit,” he said. As if he hadn’t known that their limited alcohol supply was off limits except for emergencies.

He tipped back the remainder of the bottle. He slung the empty across the room, aiming for the rat scurrying along the wall beneath a plastic wash basin. He missed.

Glass shattered, spewing and scattering across the tile. It felt good to watch it break.

“I want my fucking pain pills back,” he said. When Michonne didn’t say anything, he said, “Kid won’t tell me, but I know it was you who took them.”

Michonne moved over to one of the out-of-order washing machines, hoisting herself onto the surface. She watched him. Daryl was sick and tired of women watching him with quiet, curious eyes.

“Took me a while to find you,” she said. “I’m guessing that was on purpose. They’re serving dinner upstairs.”

When she didn’t say anything else after that, Daryl said, “What—this some sort of special invitation or something? What the hell you telling me for.”

“You should come eat with the group.”

“Not hungry.”

“I didn’t ask if you were hungry. I asked you to come eat with the group. Seeing you out of it like that… it really shook people up. It would do them good to see you on your feet again.”

“I aint some goddamn mascot. Not gonna go up there and parade around like everything’s all peachy fucking perfect.”

“It would do Rick good.”

Daryl wiped his sleeve across his mouth. “What do I care. Don’t owe him nor any of you people nothing.”

Michonne regarded him. She slid herself down off the washing machine. “No,” she said. “You don’t.”

Her boots crunched over broken glass as she crossed to the door. She turned to look at him again before she left.

“Cornering yourself off in dark rooms with a bottle of booze isn’t going to make you feel any less vulnerable. You know that, right? I know how it feels, having someone else save your life. Like you’re no longer capable of taking care of yourself… like you’re weaker, somehow. That’s not how this works.”

Daryl thought of how Michonne had left almost immediately after stitching him up on a search for antibiotics. It was why she hadn’t been there to change his dressings. She had gone off alone, overnight, digging through pharmacy after abandoned pharmacy in the dark. If she had been killed, it would have been his fault.

“Having people like this around you—people that care—it only makes you stronger. So stop trying to push us away, and come join us for some goddamn dinner.”

 

\-----

 

Daryl gave Michonne fifteen minutes. He nodded and forced a smile here and there, spooning up several mouthfuls of dry potatoes in a show of having an appetite. He excused himself to take a piss, rubbing a hand over Rick’s hair as he passed to let the man know he was okay.

“Fuck,” he breathed out, standing over the grate in the bathroom they’d been using as a urinal. None of the pipes in the men’s bathroom worked right. He braced his free hand against the wall, and hoped his unsteadiness was from the gin and not lightheadedness from being weak.

He could hear distant laughing from where the group sat in the cafeteria. He didn’t know how much longer he could be around people. No matter what Michonne said, every instinct in him was telling him to get the hell away.

When he heard another noise, quieter, coming from the cellblock, he knew immediately what it was, and what it meant.

Go back to the group, he told himself, but he was moving against his will toward the sound.

Judith was squirming, crying in the half-hearted way that meant she was trying to figure out if things were wrong enough to warrant a full wail.

Beth shushed her, swaying back and forth. “It’s just way past your bedtime, isn’t it. You’re just sleepy.”

Daryl felt his shoulder bump against the support column that he’d stopped against. The fabric of his vest scraped against the cinderblock, but Beth didn’t turn.

Idiot, Daryl thought, watching her. Noises like that—it would be not noticing them that would one day get her killed.

The baby fussed for a while longer. How long, Daryl couldn’t say. Then Beth was tucking her into the milk crate that served for a crib.

Daryl straightened, knowing it would take Beth off guard to see him there. He moved closer, hands in his back pockets, and leaned against the cell doorframe.

“Hey,” he said, making his voice quiet.

Beth whirled, opening her mouth to scream. Daryl had a hand clasped over her lips before he'd realized he'd moved.

“It’s me,” he said, his palm muffling the sound. “It’s okay. It’s just me.”

He looked down at Judith. The baby was still asleep.

Beth was breathing quickly against his hand, her exhales fast and sharp. Her pulse was running a mile a minute.

Daryl could feel the frantic pace of it. Even in the dim light, he could see the dirt on the back of his hand. His knuckles held scrapes from a scuffle he didn’t remember, his skin sun-darkened and rough and scarred. The look of it against the milk-white of her cheeks was wrong.

Daryl lowered his hand, or he meant to, but his fingers wouldn’t leave the softness of her skin. His hand had slid down to rest his thumb against the hummingbird pace of her pulse.

He wondered at the level of her helplessness. How entirely defenseless she was, how fully dependent upon the goodwill of others. If anything threatened her, all she could do was scream.

He felt her swallow beneath the weight of his hand around her throat.

“You’ve been drinking,” he heard her say.

Daryl nodded. His voice didn’t sound like his own when he said, “Yeah.”

“Are you okay?”

“Not shit-faced, if that’s what you mean.”

“It’s not.”

Daryl managed to move his eyes from where he was watching his thumb drift over the line of her collarbone, the divot at the base of her throat. He dropped his arm.

Beth shifted. She wrapped her sweater more tightly around her, but didn’t adjust where it had slipped lopsided off her shoulder. She didn’t move away from him.

“Earlier,” Daryl said. He attempted to find words. “That shit I said…”

Beth shook her head, telling him it was okay. It was as close to an apology as Daryl supposed he would ever be able to give.

She was so close that she was nearly beneath him, looking up through translucent blond eyelashes. The wisps of hair that curled around her face, Daryl wanted to push them back with both hands, holding her head as he braced her back against the wall.

He wanted to know things about her that he had no business knowing. Whether she would part her lips for him when he kissed her, letting him take her mouth without thought, or if she would keep her lips closed, hesitant. If she would become shy as he took off her clothes, or laugh and let him stare at her, too young to understand how perfect she was.

Daryl had no right to imagine it, Beth in his bed, but he had, a hundred times. Beth the innocent seductress, the blushing schoolgirl, the brazen nymph on her knees. The noises she’d make as he took her, or those she wouldn’t, the positions that would make her close her eyes and bite her bottom lip and cry out.

“Christ,” Daryl let out. He felt his hands curl into fists at his sides. He looked away.

Beth’s fingers closed loosely around his wrist. “Daryl,” she said.

“No.” He jerked his arm away. It helped, having her reach for him. Reminded him that she would always be reaching for him, needing him, and that one day when she needed him, he wouldn’t be there.

He was already going to have to watch this one die; he didn’t need to know what it felt like inside her when he was killing her the second time.

He turned and walked out of the cell.


	3. Chapter 3

Beth wouldn’t let him leave.

She followed after him as he left the cell, grabbing onto his wrist again. “It wouldn’t be any different—”

Daryl threw off her hand. “Get off me.”

“If walkers came in now, it wouldn’t change things! You’d still try to save me even if nothing else happens between us, same way you’d try to save Carol or Carl or Judith—You already carry the weight of trying to keep me alive, don’t you want some of the good things to come along with it?”

“The good things,” Daryl turned on her. “Huh? And what does that mean? I’m a bit too old to be playing at friends with benefits, sweetheart.”

“We were never meant to be friends.”

“So what.” Daryl had a hand on her jaw, and he was shoving her against the wall of the stairwell where they’d stopped. “I’m meant to fuck you, is that it?” He was acting the animal and he knew it. He had a hand between her legs. “Meant to take this sweet little cunt of yours and make it mine?”

Beth shoved him. She swung a hand at him, flat, in what would have been a slap had Daryl not caught her wrist. It was the first time Daryl saw her truly angry.

“Don’t,” she said, wrenching away her arm. She shoved him again. He barely stepped back. “You don’t get to be mean because you want me and you’re not letting yourself have me.”

“I don’t want shit. You’re a goddamn child.”

“I’m eighteen! Look at me. For once in your life, really look at me. I’m not a little girl anymore.”

“Christ,” Daryl let out, scrubbing the back of his hair as he turned away.

“I’m not asking you for forever, or for romance, or anything like that. I’m asking for one night where I get to be a teenager, when I get to feel what it’s like to be wanted by someone who looks at me the way you do. I can’t live like this forever, I need—”

What she needed Daryl didn’t know, because he had his mouth over hers, the pressure of his lips punishing. It wasn’t a kiss but Beth kissed him back anyway, melting into him so fully that it became unclear where he ended and she began. She clung to him, her arms clutched so tight around his neck that barely any of her weight was on the ground, and then none of it was, because Daryl had his palms on her ass and her legs were wound around his waist.

His thoughts were slow, a second behind his hands. Beth’s arms were in the way. She kept grasping at his shoulders, his chest as he fought to drag her sweater over her head.

“Stop,” he managed, hearing the fabric rip as he wrenched it from where it was caught between them. Beth didn’t listen but Daryl was stronger, knocking her back against the wall and forcing her arms to obey as he wrestled the sweater up and over her head. His face was between the shallow curves of her breasts without thinking, both of them sinking down as Daryl single-mindedly brought her to her back.

“You’re bleeding,” Beth breathed in, reaching.

Daryl struck her hand away before dragging the blood-stained shirt over his head. “Uh-uh,” he warned her. “Don’t you fucking dare.”

“But—“

He had her face gripped in his hand again, kissing her to keep her quiet, kissing her because her lips were soft and open and warm and nothing should feel this damned good. He balled his wife-beater beneath her head, and when he drew back, Beth was too dazed to do anything but lift her hips as Daryl started yanking down her jeans.

“Fucking hell,” Daryl swore, finding white cotton panties and coltish legs a mile long. He let Beth kick free her feet as he dropped to run his mouth along her inner thigh, burying himself in the fabric between her thighs.

This was heaven; this was the closest he’d ever get again to happiness.

She was everything he’d never wanted. His type was full-bodied women, women with heavy tits and big asses, women he didn’t need to be afraid of hurting.

He swatted Beth’s hands from his hair to pull back and look at her. She was a doll, pale-skinned and perfect against the gritty floor of the landing. Her body belonged to a pre-pubescent boy as much as it did a woman; breasts barely more than an idea, hips as narrow as her waist.

She drew herself onto her elbows, lips red from the scratch of his jaw against hers, ribcage rising and falling. Her ponytail hung crookedly to the side.

Daryl shook his head. He dug the heels of his hands into his eyes. He stood up, turning away.

Beth sat up after him. “Daryl—”

“Christ!” he yelled out. He used his elbow to strike the wall. The cut on his stomach was bleeding again full force. He slicked off some of the blood, smearing it over the cinderblock, before pounding the wall again with his fist. “Fucking cunt!” he shouted.

From the cellblock below, he could hear a muffled wail that meant Judith woke up. He sunk down into a crouch, pulling his hair back from his face with his hands.

Beth moved for him.

Daryl couldn’t let her touch him. He hated her then, everything about her. Her simple innocence, her endless stupidity. How could she still be looking at him like that after what he’d just done? He had turned her schoolgirl crush into a grown man’s fuck, stripping her naked in a stairwell and shoving his nose halfway up her cunt. She didn’t even know what need was and he’d unleashed himself on her, months and months of wanting, taking things she had no idea how to give because that’s the type of man he was.

Whatever fantasies she’d deluded herself into having, it wasn’t this, cold concrete and dirt beneath her back as he fucked her mercilessly into the floor.

He struck her hand away. “Get the fuck away from me,” he told her. He found her half-torn sweater and threw it in her direction, swiping his own grimy beater from the floor to mop more blood from his abs.

“This isn’t happening again,” he said.

“Daryl—”

“No!” he shouted. “What don’t you understand about no! What’s it going to take to get it through your thick skull—just because you’ve decided to spread your legs for the only man in a hundred miles with both a pulse and a dick doesn’t mean I’ve got to play along, princess.”

He tore his blood-drenched beater back over his head, swiping his discarded vest from the corner. “It’s fucking perfect, you know that, right? That plenty of people who were actually useful’ve died and you’re still fucking here, batting your eyelashes and telling your diary how tragic it is that no one will be able to fuck you in the back of his dad’s car on prom night. Grow the hell up.”

He looked over his shoulder when he was several steps down the stairs. “I’ll take care of Judith tonight. You go do whatever it is you need to do so I never have to hear about this again.”


	4. Chapter 4

Daryl was used to feeling dirty.

Water was hard to come by, and even when it wasn’t, he didn’t see the point in scrubbing clean just to see himself covered in more blood and brains. He rarely noticed it, the filth layered beneath his fingernails, the grime that striped his skin.

But the night after he’d tried taking Beth in the stairwell, he couldn’t get away from the feeling of being unclean. After putting the baby back to sleep, he stood beneath the pipe-cold water in the shower, watching dirt stream down his legs to pool at his feet and slowly swirl down into the drain. Minutes stretched into an hour.

The cut on his stomach was open again, a corner red and oozing. When he finally admitted defeat, forcing himself from beneath the water, he went to find Michonne for the needle and thread.

Dinner had been over for a while; she was reading in her cell. At Daryl's request, she shook her head.

“You’re not stitching yourself up," she told him flatly. "This isn’t some backwoods shed in rural Alabama, and last time I checked, you're not Davey Crockett.”

She started filtering through the collection of items on her desk to do it herself.

“Yeah, well,” Daryl exhaled, leaning his shoulder against her bunk. “Maybe you shouldn’t have done such a piss poor job of it the first time, then.”

Michonne raised an eyebrow. She held the needle pinched between her lips as she unwound thread from the spool, motioning toward the mattress.

Once she had the needle back in her fingers, she said, “Didn’t your parents teach you to be polite to people who are about to start stitching you up?”

“Parents didn’t teach me shit,” Daryl let out, sinking down into the bottom bunk.

He knew Michonne had been joking, but he wasn’t in a playful mood.

It was a lie, anyway. His dad had taught him everything he knew. Everything that mattered, anyhow. Everything that was keeping him alive.

Michonne tried handing him a glass of water and a pill.

Daryl shook his head, looking back at the bunk above him. “Just do it,” he said.

Michonne looked at him a while longer, but set the oxy aside and didn’t say anything else about it. When she was four stitches in, she said, “You really are in a mood, aren’t you. You don’t know what the hell you want.”

Daryl had his head dug back into the pillow, his jaw squeezed too tightly together to even try to answer.

“Want to talk about it?”

“Christ!" Daryl gritted out. "What, you a shrink now as well as a nurse?”

“Something’s bothering you, and it sure as hell isn’t this,” she said, referring to the cut. She set down the needle to tie off the last stitch. “You’re supposed to be moving around, getting back on your feet, not ripping this thing open again.”

“Yeah, well. I’ll be sure to do just the right amount of physical activity for you from now on, Goldilocks, all right?”

He shouldn’t have thought of blonde fairytale characters. The feeling of being unclean washed over him, stronger, too deep under his skin to ever come out.

As Michonne put away the sewing supplies, Daryl sat up, his feet on the floor as he stared at the concrete between his boots.

He scrubbed the hair on the back of his neck. He heard that Michonne had stopped sorting the items on her desk, but there was a long stretch of silence before either of them spoke.

“I gotta get out of here,” Daryl finally said. He didn’t look up. “Can’t do this shit anymore.”

Michonne watched him, Daryl could feel her eyes. He couldn't make himself meet them.

A minute passed. And then another.

“For how long?” Michonne said at last.

Daryl shook his head. “Don’t know." The words came out slowly. "Long as it takes, I guess.”

He waited for her to say something. When she didn't, he opened his mouth to make some excuse. Something to make it seem less selfish, his need to get away, but nothing came to mind and Michonne was speaking again anyway.

“If this is because of the girl…” she began.

She stopped as Daryl snapped his head up, glaring. “It aint because of no one, okay?”

It didn’t surprise him that Michonne had noticed. You couldn’t be as good at tracking as she was without picking up on the little things. If Beth had seen him eying her, so had Michonne.

“Nothing happened,” he said. He didn’t know how much she had guessed about tonight. Another lie, but this one at least held some part of the truth. “Nothing’s gonna happen,” he said, more firmly.

Eventually, Michonne nodded.

“Okay, then. I’ll stay here, keep an eye on them. Until you come back.”

 

\-----

 

Carl took the news the worst out of everyone. The conversation with Rick went a lot like it had with Michonne. Long stretches of silence. Questions of why? How long?

It ended with Rick rubbing his temples, saying, “We’ll manage without you. However long it takes.”

The words were meant to convince himself more than Daryl. The man looked twice as old as he had a year ago. Daryl was a few feet away when Rick said, “You have a home here, you know that, right? Whenever you can come back.”

Carl spent a few days refusing to speak with him. He stared at him accusingly from across the yard, stomping around and completing whatever tasks Rick assigned him with exaggerated anger.

He blamed Rick for not making him stay.

When he'd found out, he’d yelled at the both of them, calling Rick weak, Daryl selfish, saying he would come back and they’d all be dead because of him. His voice had cracked while he was shouting but he didn’t stop, not until he’d run out of words and went storming back into the cellblock.

Rick had waited, drained of energy, until Carl cooled down enough to go after him. Daryl stayed sitting in the grass.

“He’ll get over it,” Michonne said, later that day when she came to join him in the yard. The entire group had heard the yelling. “It will take a while for him to understand, but he’s a smart kid. He’ll come around.”

Daryl wished he were a hundred miles away. He had promised Carol seven days, enough time to ensure he wouldn’t rip through his stitches again. Each hour felt like an eternity.

“Do you know where you’ll go?” Michonne asked after a while.

Daryl shook his head. He stared at the group of walkers slowly scrabbling over themselves at the weak point in the fence.

“Kill that damn pig, for one,” he said after a bit.

Michonne smiled.

“After that,” he said, breathing out. “Suppose I’ll figure it out.”

He was getting up to leave when Michonne said, “The girl. You need to talk to her.”

Daryl walked back into the prison, pretending he didn’t hear.

 

\-----

 

On the morning he left, he said his goodbyes at breakfast. He gave a few stiff-armed hugs, but mostly endured the stares being sent in his direction. Carl wasn’t alone in feeling betrayed.

Rick let him take a three-day supply of canned goods with him. Daryl said he didn’t need them, but Rick had told him twice, and Daryl didn’t want to refuse again. Carl left where he’d been lingering around the edges of the kitchen, coming back from his cell with nylon knapsack stamped with some corporate logo. He didn’t look at Daryl as he shoved it into his chest.

Daryl still figured it was progress.

When no one was looking, he grabbed the kid by the back of his head to pull him in for a hug. “I’m coming back,” he told him, speaking low against his hair. “You hear?”

After that, there was nothing else to do but leave. Daryl started for the yard and the gate, but ended up in the last place he wanted to be, hovering outside the entrance to Beth’s cell.

She was in her bunk, ankles crossed and her head on her arm as she wrote in her journal. Even the bottom of her feet looked fragile.

“Still not one for goodbyes, huh,” Daryl said.

It was an inane comment, but the only thing he could think of to say. Beth sat up to look at him. Her expression was unreadable. She shook her head, looping her arms around the knees she’d drawn up near her chest.

“Can I come in?”

Beth watched him for a long moment. “Why?” she finally asked.

It was a fair question. Daryl lifted his shoulder, telling her he didn’t know.

Her eyes were big, but they were always big. Wide enough to be brimming with tears, but perfectly dry.

Daryl tucked his hands into his back pockets, nodding. He swallowed. “Take care of yourself, then, huh?”

It wasn’t until he was a half mile away from the prison that his throat stopped burning.


	5. Chapter 5

Time went quickly when Daryl was on his own. The days were filled with survival. Tracking. Hunting. Setting traps to keep walkers from stumbling upon him as he slept.

He came across a few groups of travelers, drifters following the same river he was. Most of them were fine people. Wary, but not looking for trouble if he kept his distance. One family let him share their campfire a few nights. They gave him a pair of jeans that had belonged to their dead son after seeing that Daryl had ripped the knee out of his. In return, he gave them a tree squirrel he’d shot and one of the cans of food from Rick. They told him it was the first time they’d had green beans since this all started.

But they thanked him too gratefully, and on the third night, the mom started singing old country-western songs. She had a nice voice, clear as the stars in the sky, and Daryl knew it was time to move on.

Somewhere near the gulf, he ran into road robbers. They stole Carl’s knapsack and everything Daryl had accumulated in the months he’d been wandering—a half-used packet of matches, a torn tarp that mostly held out the rain, a few tins of cat food. They roughed him up bad enough that his jaw wouldn’t open for over a week. In a show of inexplicable mercy—or perhaps just stupidity—they'd left him his crossbow. It did him only a small amount of good. Chewing meat became an excruciating ordeal, a serious problem given that game was the only thing in his diet he could depend on.

He spent all his waking hours foraging for berries that he could grind up and swallow without chewing. He had to use a makeshift awl to drill a new hole into his belt. When he became too weak to wade around in the bushes for more than a quarter hour at a time, he gave up and started following the bay toward Mobile.

The city would bring danger, but one of the abandoned suburbs would have to have food.

“Texas,” one woman told him, somehow having managed to keep two of her children alive. The youngest was strapped to her back; the eldest dead-eyed as she stared at Daryl from halfway behind her mom’s leg. “They say there’s hope in Texas.”

She didn’t give him any food, but in his weakened state, she trusted him to come near enough to share her map. She pointed him to the nearest town.

There was a fierceness to her that Daryl thought about for a while after meeting her. He staggered along the shoulder of an abandoned two-lane highway, forcing himself to think of anything but the people he’d left back in the prison. She’d had a wild determination in the set of her jaw. Like an Indian woman on the Trail of Tears, forging onward because she knew she could never look back.

The city she’d directed him to was overrun, but he had some luck in a town a few miles north named Crestridge. There he found a duplex that had one half not broken into. The owners had boarded up as if preparing for a hurricane before they left. Daryl used the edge of a downed yield sign to pry up the nails on the boarded-up windows. He didn’t leave the pantry for days, eating stale crackers and washing them down with juice boxes and whole quarts of applesauce.

He packed the rest into a pillowcase to bring back to Judith, along with a six-pack of strawberry flavored meal replacement drinks and a couple cans of olives.

One of the cans of olives he ate; the other he traded for a night in a camper sheltered from a thunderstorm. The old man who lived there didn’t speak. He stared at Daryl, watching him as he scooped the olives one by one from the can with his cupped fingers. He drank the olive water, tipping the can up so he could get every drop. He smelled worse than any man Daryl had ever met, and in the morning, he woke Daryl with a double-barrel shotgun pointed at his ear.

This man would make it to the end, Daryl thought, cussing and shouting as he stumbled out of the camper. It would be the three of them—he, this hermit, and Michonne—the sad sack of humanity that’d be there to greet whatever came after Armageddon.

 

\-----

 

He meant to turn back north, following the river back to the prison, but found himself moving in circles instead.

He had trouble controlling his thoughts. What if they weren’t there anymore, at the prison? Because some threat had forced them to move on. Or because they’d learned of something better and they left him, abandoning him the same way he had them.

Or maybe they were still there, just all dead.

Daryl couldn’t tell which thought scared him most.

He picked his way through several more suburbs, spending a week here, a week there. He came back to Crestridge a few times. He sifted through the neighborhood where he’d found the duplex in hopes that other houses in that area had been ignored by raiders, but found none of the same luck.

He was on his way out of town again when he heard the screams.

It was only after he was bounding over a fence and a tree felled by a storm, making his way to the building from which the screams originated, that he realized he was playing the role of the fool hero. Risking his life to save someone who would be dead and half-eaten before he reached her.

Rick’s role, Daryl thought, slamming his shoulder against a set of double doors. They didn’t budge. But then again, Rick had changed. Maybe even he wasn’t idiot enough to try this now.

The building was an elementary school. An empty playground sat on the far side, and taped to the inside of a few windows were sun-faded children’s drawings. Daryl tried breaking through a windowpane with the butt of his crossbow, but it wouldn’t crack. Bulletproof.

He sometimes forgot that the world was plenty fucked up before any of this happened.

Another set of shrieks came as Daryl went back to crashing his shoulder against the double doors. It sounded like the woman was pleading for mercy. Humans, then, were the attackers. Not walkers. Daryl could guess what they were doing to her.

A splintering noise; the doors had been braced shut with a broom through their handles. Two more leaps against them and Daryl was bursting through, crossbow lifted as he scuttled along the walls of dark hallways.

The woman was in what must have been an administrative office. A small room with several adult-sized desks, posters plastered across walls and the floor littered with papers. She was more a girl than a woman; she couldn’t have been a day older than twenty two. She was bent over a desk, her face streaked with sweat and tears.

“Get down!” Daryl shouted at her, banging in through the door. He searched for the men that had her pinned down. He didn’t find them.

He saw the pistol in the girl’s hand only a fraction of a second before she had it pointed at his chest.

“Get out!” she screamed. A crack and Daryl had thrown himself to the side, a bullet embedded in the doorframe only inches from where he’d been.

“One step closer and the next one’s in your heart, so help me God!” Her voice cracked on the last word; her breaths were heaving. The thud of metal as she slammed the gun back onto the desk, using both her hands to brace herself as she let out another tortured scream.

Daryl understood, then, without needing to see the swell of her belly. She wasn’t under attack; she was having a baby.

 

\----

 

There had been plenty of times on his travels when Daryl thought about the people he’d left and he’d lost, but never as desperately as he did now.

He would have given his crossbow to have Herschel here next to him, using his horse trainer voice to inch up to the girl to help her. Even the ones with no medical training, Rick, or Maggie, they would approach with lifted hands and figure out what to do, because that’s the type of people they were.

Hell, at this point, Daryl would even take fucking Dale.

Anyone who could actually do something.

Daryl was helpless. He hadn’t felt so out of control—so powerless—since that night after what happened on the stairwell with Beth. He needed to get out of here.

Slowly, he stood up, palms facing the girl as he prepared to back away.

“Get out!” the girl screamed at him again.

Daryl nodded, bending to pick up his crossbow. “Leaving, all right? Not going to hurt you.”

Another shot, so close that he could feel the pull of the bullet by his ear.

“Christ!” he let out, back on his stomach against the floor. From the ground, he yelled, “The hell is wrong with you, woman? I aint tryna do nothing to you or your baby. I need my bow to watch the doors, make sure no walkers get in.”

He was capable of that, at least. He could trust himself to be a bodyguard.

“You’re the—“ the girl bit off what she was saying, choking off another scream between gritted teeth. “You’re the reason it’s open; I had everything fine before you came in.”

“Fine?” Daryl repeated, incredulous. The stupidity of the comment helped ground him. “You’re birthing a goddamn baby bent over the principal’s desk holding a Beretta. I don’t know what kind of la maz shit you learned, but this don’t feel like ‘fine’ to me.”

The girl let her forehead rest against the desk. Her fingers still gripped tight around the gun, but she loosened enough to allow her exhaustion to show through. God knows how long she’d been in labor.

Daryl slowly ventured standing again. Looking at her, he realized that no matter how helpless he was in this situation, she was more.

He swore. He wiped at his mouth, looking over his shoulder at the empty hallway. “Look,” he said. He swore again. “I’m a piss poor excuse for a midwife, but I’m all you got, and I aint moving. Won’t touch you unless you need me to, but you aint gonna do this thing on your own.”

When the girl didn’t try shoot him again, just kept taking in heaving breaths, her face grimaced against the pain, Daryl took a step closer. “Now let go of that goddamn gun. Keep it by you for all I care, but I'm gonna be in charge of killing anything that comes in. You just worry about getting that kid out alive.”

 

\-----

 

Nine hours later, the sun sat low in the west, sending flat beams of light in through clouded windows, and Daryl held a baby in his arms. The thing was slimy and so tiny, its wails pathetically weak, but it had ten fingers and ten toes and was breathing. Daryl used the edge of an arrow to cut the cord—he still hadn’t found a good army knife after the road robbers took his—and awkwardly transferred the baby into its mom’s arms.

The girl sobbed. She bent over the newborn’s head, whispering promises Daryl had no business hearing.

He left the office, sinking down against lockers hardly higher than his hip that lined the hallway. He swallowed against the lump that had climbed up in his throat.

He didn’t know if he was happy or sad or simply exhausted, if the water that threatened to leave the corners of his eyes was from the horrifying miracle he’d just experienced or the fact that he sat in a hallway littered with the echoes of hundreds of other little miracles that never had a chance.

So many Sophias.

“Goddamn it,” he gritted it out, squeezing his eyes shut and pressing his head back against a dead child’s locker. He let himself listen to the newborn’s tepid little cries, and stopped caring enough to hold back the tears.

Later, he found a stack of blankets in a closet in a kindergarten room and assembled a bed for the girl and the kid. She hadn’t told him her name, hadn’t told him thanks, but there was something alongside the mistrust in her eyes when she looked at him. She may not like him being around, but a part of her was grateful he was there.

He lay down on his own pile of blankets in the hallway outside the office, and for the first night in a long while, fell asleep without wishing he were a better man.


	6. Chapter 6

In the teacher’s lounge, they won the lottery twice. A mini-fridge with twenty-nine bottles of pure, clean water, and a carton of Marlboro Lights stashed beneath a few sweatshirts in a teacher’s cubby. Only one pack was missing.

Daryl set two bottles of water in front of Karis with a thud. It had taken five full days, but she had finally caved and told him her name. When Daryl had given her his, she’d looked up from where she was feeding her baby. “I aint naming him after you, you know,” she told him drily.

Daryl couldn’t help but laugh. It felt strange, after so long.

“Suppose that’s fair,” he’d said, “Name aint been that much luck anyhow.”

Karis drank a full one of the bottles before she managed to deliver him an annoyed look for making noise around the baby. The kid didn’t wake up, though, and overall, he seemed to be a pretty good sleeper. When he cried, his pipes didn’t sound quite as thin as they had a few days ago. Daryl took both as a good sign.

“There’s more in a fridge,” he said, moving over to feel the fuzz on top of the kid’s head. Much more hair than what Judith had had. Still had, he corrected himself. Judith was still alive. They all were still alive.

“Gonna go see if I can find a backup generator. Spotted some gas in the basement, we might even get the fridge working again tonight. Cold water, how about that, little hell-raiser?” he asked the baby, “Get you used to living the proper life of luxury.”

 

\----

 

It _was_ luxury, Daryl thought that night. They had moved to sleeping in the center of the gym after a walker somehow found its way into the hallway. Nothing had happened. Daryl had woken to it bumping and snarling against the office door, and had ended it with a ruler through its eye. The baby didn’t even stir.

But it had scared Karis. The gym was the safer option. No windows, and two sets of doors that were easy to secure closed.

Daryl had dragged exercise mats to the center of the basketball court, and set up a few flashlights for light. He stared up at the ceiling, watching smoke rise from his cigarette. He savored the feel of it in his lungs, the blessed coolness of the air-conditioning, the awareness that everything, at this moment, was okay.

“Suppose I should get mad at you for smoking that,” Karis said, staring down at a squirmy baby. “But if he dies from lung cancer, I think I done an okay job as his momma.”

Daryl looked at her. He agreed, but pressed out the cigarette on the gym floor anyway. He tucked the end back into his pocket. He’d smoke the rest later.

“You got a name yet?” he eventually asked. “Or is the kid gonna grow up like Prince?”

“Huh?”

Christ, Daryl thought to himself. Too young to even know about the “artist formerly called Prince” bull shit. He was growing tired of feeling ancient.

He didn’t try to explain. He shifted to scratch an itch on his balls. If Karis was fine feeding the kid in front of him, he figured they were past the point of social niceties.

He wondered if Beth would ever get used to his crassness. He doubted it; she would likely always blush and look away, uncomfortable. That was if she was alive, somewhere he could find her, and willing to ever look at him again.

The relaxed feeling was gone.

He sat up, his body automatically trying to move as if that could force away the thoughts. He rubbed at the hair on the back of his head.

“Shit,” he let out.

Over the past couple days, something had become clear to him. Watching Karis, thinking about the women he’d met on the road—the lioness protecting her two cubs, the mother who’d lost her son but still sang country music up at the stars—he'd slowly come to understand that strength and survival were not the same thing.

Men, they made it through this world by reverting to their brute natures. Most of them, anyway. Daryl thought of Shane. The convicts. Himself. Men who defaulted to the savage inside because that’s what it took to survive.

Women, though. Women were different. They knew how to grow strong without becoming brittle; ferocious without becoming animals.

When Daryl closed his eyes, he couldn’t stop seeing Beth. Her quiet, watchful eyes. The determined set of her jaw. She might have as much chance of making it through as a mayfly missing its wings, but that didn’t mean her insides weren’t made of iron.

Daryl looked over his shoulder at Karis. She was still trying convince the baby to fall asleep.

“You staring at me again,” Karis commented after a bit, not looking up. “Beginning to think you want to ride off into the sunset together, raise this kid as yours.”

Daryl managed a smile. He stood up, wiping his hands on his jeans before heading to take a piss. “Yeah, well. Trying to think of ways to make my pa roll over in his grave. Figure bringing him back a black grandbaby might well do it.”

It was a stupid thing for him to say, he thought as he stood in a corner. Not because of the race part. Young as she was, Karis had grown up in the same south he had. She’d made enough remarks about a white redneck come to save the day to make the topic familiar ground.

But because it might make her think of the baby’s father. Daryl didn’t know anything about him. He guessed that Karis didn’t either. What he thought he’d been bounding in to stop when he broke into the school had most likely happened nine months earlier.

It wasn’t until an hour later, after the baby had fallen asleep and Daryl had lit another cigarette, that Karis said, “Your dad. He’s the reason you got them scars, aint he.”

It wasn’t a question, and Daryl didn’t feel the need to answer. He guessed Karis came from the type of house that knew the mark a belt buckle left as well as he did.

“Just shows you, don’t it,” she said after a while, speaking more to bundle in her arms than she was to Daryl. “Don’t mean nothing, the type of daddy a baby has. He can grow up into whatever type of man he wants.”

 

\----

 

Karis used the last bottle of water from the fridge to stage a baptism. Daryl, for the second time in less than two weeks, found himself playing a role he never imagined he’d be stuck in. First, a midwife, now, a priest.

He felt like an idiot, dumping water from an old Dasani bottle over the sleeping boy’s head.

“Well?” Karis looked at him.

“Well what?”

“You’re supposed to say something.”

“Say what? Karis, the last time I was in church I barely had hair on my balls. This is stupid.”

“Just make something up.”

“What’s the point of this anyway? Isn’t this supposed to keep him from going to hell? Look around you, woman, we’re already in hell. The jig is up.”

“It’s important to me,” she said. She smoothed her hand back over the boy’s forehead, pushing water back into his hair. “Fine, I’ll say something. Do it again.”

Daryl obeyed, careful to avoid the boy’s eyes with another half cup of water.

Karis spoke about stuff Daryl was no longer sure he believed, if he ever had. About God’s love, and salvation, and of heaven and all the angels that waited for him when he died.

At the end, she said, “And so I hope Jesus knows that we did the best we could, with no holy water or priest or nothing, but that we baptize you, Dixon Able, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.”

Daryl watched her trace a careful cross over the boy’s forehead. The little hell-raiser remained sound asleep. After a stretch of silence, he said, “Thought you weren’t going to name it after me.”

Karis shrugged. “Figured I’d give him something to remember you by. Aint long now, until you leave.”

She lifted the baby—Dixon—to her shoulder, and lifted an eyebrow in amusement at Daryl’s look of confusion. He hadn’t yet told her he was making plans to head back.

“I’m from the projects, Daryl. I know what it looks like when a man is about to leave me.”

Daryl had to work out how to respond.

“You can come with me,” he finally said. He had told her about the prison. Bits and pieces, night after night. She knew about Rick, and Carl, and Carol. She knew about Beth.

It was an empty offer. Not that Daryl didn’t think Rick and the others would accept her. But because Karis had a sister in Florida. She and the kid would head there.

Daryl knew better than to try convince her. When she set her mind on something, the girl was worse than Michonne.

Karis shook her head. “You go back to your family. I’ve gotta keep on looking for mine.”

 

\-----

 

He left them. On the morning he took off, he constructed a baby carrier out of an ACE wrap he’d dug from a medical supply kit in the nurse’s office for when Karis started on her own journey. He rubbed Dixon’s full head of hair.

“Take care of yourself,” he told her. He had been about to add ‘kid’ to the end, but caught himself. She was like Beth. Barely more than a girl on the outside, but built of stuff stronger than steel. She was more of an adult than he would ever be.

Women like this. If there was a hope for the soul of humanity, these were the ones that held it.

It hurt, walking away. Sometime—tomorrow, next week, ten years from now—both she and the baby would be dead. There was nothing Daryl could do.

But that knowledge didn’t choke him the way it once would have. It still made him feel helpless, but he realized he couldn’t fight against it, just like he couldn’t fight against what he felt for Beth.

Some things just needed to be accepted.

He found his way back to the river, and in half the days it had taken him to work his way south, he was standing in front of gate to the prison.


End file.
